The Kiss That Counted

by Karin Kallmaker

  "And beat her, and raised her to be a criminal?" Karita's voice shook with outrage. "Who stood by and let her mother be—"

  "Karita, please." CJ took a step forward and was relieved she didn't limp. "I want both of you to leave."

  Aunt Bitty's grimace showed her amusement at Karita's defiance. CJ cringed when her grip tightened on the cane. "Looks like you've got a white tiger here fighting for you, Cassie June. Is she that ferocious in bed, too?"

  "Now, listen here," Lucy began.

  "Lucy, please. Everybody, please." CJ had to take two more steps to make herself the closest person to Aunt Bitty and her cane. "One more time. I want you both to leave."

  "Or what? You'll call the cops?"

  "Yes, I will." Believe it, old woman, she said with her eyes.

  "See you in Fayette, then. Every so often someone comes around to find out if we've heard from Cassie June, who is still on the run." The way Aunt Bitty's hands gripped and twisted the cane made CJ's heart skip beats.

  "What a pack of—"

  "Burnett, please!"

  Aunt Bitty included them all with the same gesture of dismissal. "Daria, honey, we're in the company of a bunch of queers."

  For a long moment, all CJ could hear was the sound of Aunt Bitty's hand smacking some part of her body and the cackle when Cassie June flinched after a little knife suddenly embedded itself into the wall next to her hand.

  A dozen insults a day, a hundred lectures about her worthless, useless existence—they all welled up inside her. She could see the ghost-like face of the old memory of Aunt Bitty standing over Uncle Vaughn, except the apparition she faced now had eyes, eyes like her father's, eyes just like the ones that looked back at her from the mirror every day.

  She wanted to crawl away to a safe place. She couldn't find her voice.

  Daria's laugh grated down CJ's spine. She took one last puff on her cigarette, then began to stub it out on the arm of the sofa.

  Burnett was a blur. He instantly snatched the butt out of Daria's hand. "Well, it's not hard to tell who raised you."

  Daria opened her mouth to retort, but Burnett held the smoldering cigarette under her nose.

  "I know people who would put this out on your tonsils, and make you like it." He whirled around to face Aunt Bitty, one irate finger pointed at her chest. "As for you, you are rude, crude and thoroughly without class. This woman is my big sister, you shrew, and nobody talks about my family that way."

  Lucy drawled, "At least not so unimaginatively. Queer is the best they can do?"

  Burnett put a hand to his chest. "I could have at least gotten faggot, but sissy boy? Please."

  Karita, radiating her beautiful calm, said simply, "We're not afraid of you."

  But you should be, CJ wanted to say. She felt Karita take her hand and she glanced at her.

  Those incredible eyes were deep, like lakes fed directly from blue heavens. "I begin to understand what you faced." She squeezed CJ's hand. "You were young and you were alone. Now you're not."

  CJ took a deep breath and let go of Karita's hand. Lucy and Burnett were still discussing the lack of appropriate insults when CJ looked directly at Aunt Bitty.

  "Are all the men in prison? Is that why it's you who's going to try to fetch me home? Nothing left of the Rochambeaus but you for a matriarch?"

  "Your family has been waiting a long time to settle with you, Cassie June." Aunt Bitty leaned on her cane with pure menace.

  "Your father is still sitting in Big Sandy, waiting for you. You saved your own skin when you said it was him that pulled the trigger. You owe us. You're one of us."

  CJ's voice was shaking, but there was nothing she could do about it. "Listen to me, old woman. I got no deal for saying he did it. There was no plea bargain. His hand was on the gun, too. He deserves to rot in prison."

  "All you had to say is that he never touched it. You were a minor. Instead of five to life, he'd be out by now. You wouldn't have done more than five You turned on him."

  "He turned on me by telling me to lie to save his skin. A lighter sentence for him, a longer one for me, that was his proposal. No matter how much I did what he said, I was still disposable." CJ pulled herself up short. There was no point in arguing with Aunt Bitty. "So I lied, just a little. Don't it make you proud?"

  Burnett, from behind her, said quietly, "You can't have regrets if you're dead, CJ. Remember?"

  Out of the mouths of babes, CJ wanted to say, but she heard the siren at the same time Aunt Bitty and Daria did. The three of them cocked their heads, evaluating if it was coming closer. The shared blood, the long history, must be plain to everyone else now.

  Lucy brought her cell phone out from behind her back. "Yes, they're coming here. Gotta love text messaging."

  CJ didn't know if it was a bluff but the siren was definitely getting louder. Aunt Bitty and Daria had to be thinking about the code of the Gathering. When the cops were on the way, all fights stopped. They'd resume again when the cops left. In front of cops, social workers, any outsider, they were one big happy family. CJ knew if she played by those rules she was back dancing to Aunt Bitty's tune. Never again—she had sworn it her second night in Fayette. Never again.

  But what had changed? How could she fight them? What did she have now that she hadn't had then?

  "Time's running out." Karita was as calm as she had been last night facing the berserker with the baseball bat, but she'd learned that people like that really would hurt her if they could. Yet she stood her ground, just the same.

  "Run along, now," Burnett said. "Shoo."

  Lucy and Burnett hardly knew her, and yet they were defending her. CJ heard the echoes of the kind things Julia and Tr e had said, the offers of friendship and introductions to nice women from Raisa and Devon. Maybe they saw someone that she didn't, but she had her whole life to learn to see herself the way they did. Lord knows, she ached to be who they thought she was. She wanted to be the woman Karita loved.

  She took one more step, well within range of Aunt Bitty's cane.

  "The same blood may flow in our veins, but you are not my family." She spread her arms. "This is my family, the one I choose. And to keep my family I will go back to jail if I have to. I will never go back to you."

  Daria got to her feet, all swagger. "Such a pretty speech. The tipline pays ten grand for escapees. Double it and we'll leave. For a while."

  "She doesn't have any money," Karita said. "She's spent it all paying back the people you taught her to steal from. She put that minister's daughter through college."

  CJ, abruptly aware of the cash-stuffed backpack just around the corner in the bedroom, began to shush Karita, but Aunt Bitty actually recoiled. Her disdain of CJ transformed to incomprehension.

  Karita, whom Aunt Bitty would see as truthful, honest, trusting—the perfect mark—smiled with something like pity. "She's useless to you. She's raising money for a battered women's shelter. She worries so much about lying that she can't do anything but tell the truth."

  The sirens stopped nearby.

  Feeling like a helpless spectator, CJ watched Karita's limitless shining light negate Aunt Bitty's darkness. It was no contest, even, but it wasn't Karita's battle to fight

  If a woman like that can love me, CJ thought, then I can fight for myself.

  She stood her ground, too, and found the truth. "I'm not afraid of you. If you want to hit me, go ahead. I survived you once, and I can do it again. But I'm not a child anymore. I will fight back, but not in ways you expect." She took a deep breath to steady her voice. "I'm not afraid of the police, and neither are my friends." She swung around to the back door, unlocked it and threw it open. "If you don't want to meet up with the cops you'd better run now."

  Daria plucked at Aunt Bitty's sleeve. The haughty, stiff face was the same mask of contempt, but there was something in those eyes CJ didn't recognize. Then Aunt Bitty did something CJ had never seen before.

  She stepped back.

  CJ took a step toward her and she st
epped back again.

  In full retreat, circling toward the back door, Aunt Bitty turned at the threshold with a sneer for all of them and spat.

  Karita was a crazy woman, a beautiful, darling, Madonna-goddess-elf creature, CJ thought, because she said, "Even a llama spits better than that."

  CJ wanted to cry or laugh or both. She wasn't sure. She really didn't know what had just happened except that Burnett was giggling about something and Lucy admitted the siren was a helpful coincidence.

  "Suckers! They bought it." Burnett and Lucy shared high fives.

  She sat at the table, arms shaking, while they laughed and chatted and drank coffee. She found the wherewithal to make a few offhand remarks, but her head was spinning. What could they be all so happy about? Did other people really laugh when confronted with that kind of threat? Finally, Karita shooed Lucy and Burnett out the door.

  With a loving smile, Karita crossed the room to wrap her arms around CJ's shoulders from behind. The warmth of her body was instantly soothing and the scent of her, blended with familiar shampoo and soap, steadied CJ's reeling senses. "Do I need to make you tea with sugar?"

  "Please, no, anything but that." She loved the way Karita's laughter sounded in her ear. "I'd love some water though."

  "It's going to be okay. It's really going to be okay." Karita set a glass in front of her and pulled the other chair close. One hand soothingly stroked CJ's forearm.

  "Those people…" CJ sipped to clear her throat. "Those people terrorized my life, five years of it. You all laughed at them and I was scared. Which of us is crazy?"

  "Sweetheart," Karita said, "you were raised to fear them. They are scary, bad people, and I know some of what they did to you. There are things they did that I don't know about, too, and so maybe I wasn't as scared as I should have been. But I was still frightened. Mostly by what you thought they could do to you. But no way were they taking you away from me."

  "I'm going to have to go back to jail, Karita."

  "You don't know that for sure."

  Goodness, but she loved this woman. Her endless optimism was unrealistic, but the flicker of hope that maybe, just maybe, Karita might be right, was welcome. She never hoped for good things to happen and so was rarely disappointed. In this case, however, maybe hope, combined with Karita to support her, wasn't completely foolhardy. "On their best days, those people are merely spiteful. Don't doubt it, they will call the tipline and turn me in."

  "Then maybe you should do it first"

  "Or you should do it, and make the ten grand."

  Karita appeared to think it over. "My house needs weatherproofing, real bad."

  CJ's laugh turned weepy and she let Karita pull her close. "I'm so afraid that if I go back to Fayette some of them will be waiting for me."

  Karita kissed her forehead. "You stay right here."

  CJ watched Karita fetch the phone. She was practically humming as she pressed the buttons.

  "Where the heck are you? Do I hear puppies barking? You just happened to be in the neighborhood with extra muffins?" Karita listened for a moment, a smile of delight curving her lips. "You were still in the neighborhood after your date last night. I see."

  She listened to Karita make plans to meet after lunch with the person on the other end of the line. When she hung up, CJ asked her, "Where are you going?"

  "We are going to an animal rescue facility."

  "Why?"

  Karita grinned, looking very much as if she'd just successfully spun straw into gold. " To meet with a lawyer, of course."

  Chapter 15

  CJ stared out the window of the animal rescue's back room, watching cars go by on the curving, narrow highway that connected the small mountain communities with Denver. The September afternoon was cool, and wind-stirred leaves flashed red and orange in the clear yellow light.

  She didn't think Karita's friend could have useful advice, but getting out of her apartment had helped to settle her nerves. Though she hadn't really been worried, it also helped to see that Pam was completely enamored with the dynamic Nann. Whatever feelings had led to Pam and Karita going out on a date, they were clearly based in friendship now.

  "I'm sorry you drove up here for nothing, Karita." Pam was busy shoveling chow to kittens. "I took the basic classes in criminal law, but I've never practiced it. I wouldn't be qualified to help you on a matter that was exclusively based in Colorado, let alone a matter in Kentucky."

  "Do you know someone in Kentucky?" At Karita's question,

  CJ couldn't help but turn her gaze to drink in the lovely vision Karita made idly stroking the euphoric kitten draped over her arm. She knew just how that kitten felt.

  Pam gave CJ another curious look. "No. Nearly everybody I went to school with headed for the big money firms on the East Coast. I'd be happy to scan the list of people in my graduating class to see if anybody enrolled in the Kentucky Bar, but it's a long shot. I'm curious—why don't you ask Marty?"

  "Marty's my boss," Karita explained to CJ. To Pam she said, "I sort of called in sick today, and I didn't want him to know I wasn't."

  Pam grinned. Turning to scoop out more chow to the next cage of cats, she said, "The man calls you princess and would adopt you if you weren't too old. He's not going to hold helping out a friend against you. Besides, Marty spent his first five years out of law school as an assistant DA in Jefferson County. It's not Kentucky, but he's got to have some basic advice. He's likely to know somebody who knows somebody."

  CJ cleared her throat. "I don't want to cause any more trouble for Karita."

  "I can appreciate that," Pam said. "I'd love to tell you that all will be forgiven, but I don't know enough…"

  About you remained unspoken between them. CJ understood the protective fare in Pam's eyes. She could only imagine what Emily was going to say.

  Fervently, Karita explained, "She's paid back nearly all the people she can remember helping her father to steal from. That's got to count for something."

  "It should," Pam admitted.

  Nann bustled into the room with a leash. "The owners of that Husky are here." She gave CJ another skeptical look, obviously on the growing list of people who hadn't a clue what Karita could see in her.

  "Goodie," Karita said. "Another happy ending. You've gotten so many of them back to their owners already." She signaled for CJ to follow her. "You won't believe how many marmots there are in the back, and half of them got away."

  CJ had never been up close and personal with a marmot. She drank in the sight of Karita walking ahead of her and knew in her heart that watching her was far more fun than anything marmots could ever do for her.

  Karita opened the door to an outdoor area. "See? Couple dozen of the poor refugees. It'll probably be safe enough to release them tomorrow or the day after."

  CJ didn't look at the marmots. She looked at the llama. She looked at Karita. There was really nothing more to say except the truth.

  "You amaze me. And I love you."

  Feeling exceedingly shy Karita said, "And this is my little house."

  "You have all this land, too?"

  "Yeah. A half-acre. If I hike up that way I can see Kenny Peak from the mesa. That's Mt. Evans—a fourteener." Karita pointed at her favorite mountain, all blues and grays capped with white.

  "The house is adorable." CJ turned off the engine and quiet fell. High overhead, wind stirred the trees. "What a beautiful spot."

  "It is. I like it here. I think my grandmother stayed in Minnesota for me. If I'd known this was here, I'd have moved us in a heartbeat. There's not very much humidity in Norway, so she'd have liked this climate. I know I do."

  CJ inhaled deeply and Karita didn't avert her gaze from the lovely parts of CJ that rose and fell. "It's very you—all the trees and the sound of the creek. Fresh. Natural." She bit her bottom lip, slightly flushed. "What a quaint little cottage."

  "Quaint is one word for it. Come on, I'll give you the tour."

  CJ followed Karita into the house. "It's ha
rdly bigger than my apartment."

  "Easy to clean, that's for sure." Karita explained about the weatherproofing and the age of the building, but couldn't help but notice that the kitchen floor. was not entirely level anymore, and the living room's exterior walls showed signs of strain. "You think I should probably pull it all down, don't you?"

  CJ looked as if she wanted to protest, then she gave it up. "Yes, you probably should. The foundation and the house are going two different directions and I'm pretty sure dry rot is the least of your worries. With the land to mortgage you could build a very nice, modern home. Start with a core structure and plan to expand if you need to."

  "I'm not sure I can afford the payments. The law office. pays well enough to keep me volunteering for things I care about," Karita said. She gave CJ a furtive glance and was reassured by the nod of understanding. "Here, sit down at the table and rest your knee. I might not be much of a cook, but I make very good coffee."

  "That sounds heavenly." CJ dutifully propped up her knee while Karita bustled around the tiny kitchen.

  Once they were both at the table, aromatic brews giving off steam, CJ linked her fingers. with Karita's. "I can't make you any promises, so it doesn't seem right to ask you for any."

  CJ's warm hand caused a riot of goose bumps all along Karita's back. "What do you mean?"

  "All I can say is that I'm going to try, try as hard as I know how, to at least give us a chance. And if you'll say the same—"

  "Yes."

  "I didn't finish."

  "Yes."

  CJ lifted Karita's hand to kiss the back. "I might be gone for a while."

  "Now you know where I live. The only promise I need right now is that you're coming back."

  "If you promise me you won't let the roof fall in on you."

  Karita laughed. "It's not that bad. Besides, the only danger of that would be if you were here all the time. When I'm with you I think the world could stop turning and I wouldn't notice."

  "It does stop turning," CJ said. "I noticed, but when I'm with you I don't care."

  "Sweet talker." Karita didn't care that she was blushing. She was glad to see CJ's color had returned and the lines of stress around her mouth had eased. "My boss always has fifteen minutes free after staff meetings on Thursday afternoons. I can get you in to talk to him then."